Mrs Ali saw me coming. My son’s former teacher is a formidable woman, the sort who radiates a deep sense of gravitas without even speaking. She could probably convince me to sign up for a war, so getting me to join the school’s Daily Directed Reading (DDR) programme was child’s play. And so, for the past school year, I’ve been a Reading Champion, spending two mornings each week helping four- and five-year-olds to read.I liked the idea of being a Reading Champion, not least because it implies that I, myself, have conquered the art. In truth, champion is used here in the active, advocatory sense – great readers like me, we know these things – and it’s my job to champion reading to my tiny charges. The books used to do this are not, it should be said, endlessly fascinating texts, and are more geared toward starting a tiny little brain on its reading journey. And I really do mean “starting”. The week before I started, some of the kids were taught how to hold the physical book itself. As such, the year that’s followed has felt nothing short of miraculous.This is because the logistics of reading are, from certain angles, incomprehensible. Homo sapiens (us lot) have existed in modern form for about 300,000 years. By modern, I mean humans whose brains and bodies were so similar to our own that a diabolical scientist could travel back 300,000 years, steal a baby, and raise it back in 2026 as someone who was, imperceptibly, one of us.[ My teacher told my parents I was ‘retarded’. My grandmother taught me to readOpens in new window ]The earliest “proper” writing was long thought to be ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, dating from about 5,000 years ago. More recent research suggests writing emerged several times in disparate parts of the planet, simultaneously, while more abstract markings, which nonetheless look encouragingly text-like, have been discerned in cave paintings and carved into mammoth tusks, which might push the starting point to about 40,000 years ago. Which means that even our most generous estimates point toward literacy being a bafflingly recent invention. Or, to put it another way: we may have been “us” for 300,000 years, but for the first 260,000 to 295,000 years of that time, the written word did not exist.It’s a startling thought, which contains within it that gnawing sense of the infinite I get any time I consider the beginnings of things. How, precisely, did anyone work out we could store information in this way? How the hell did they teach someone else to do it? Did one human do it and tell another, then another? How much did this even happen, in practice? For all that we may say that Sumerian script was in use when “humans started reading and writing the way we do”, by that we surely mean that a very small number of Sumerians did this, while the rest did not, and no one else on the planet was doing it at all.I find my patience unlimited, since continued exposure to this process has left me in awe that anyone has ever once learned to read at allOnce you start thinking of writing less in terms of invention and more in terms of adoption, it becomes so recent a phenomenon that dizziness sets in. At the time of the Great Famine, less than half of Irish people could read. By 1900, literacy rates for the entire world stood at just over 20 per cent (they’re currently at 87 per cent). As such, a process that we blithely expect four-year-olds to pick up as simply as breathing was beyond the reach of 80 per cent of people on the planet 100 years ago, and is still out of reach for 700 million humans today.I’ve got some sense of this for the past year, sitting with the kids each Wednesday and Thursday morning. They are, of course, adorable, and in my 10 months with them have grown their half-foots and shed some baby teeth. Shed, too, have been their fumbling, stumbling first efforts to ascribe meaning to arbitrary squiggles printed on paper. Before I started, I worried I’d lack the care and patience of actual teachers who are, after all, trained to persevere through such missteps. In reality, I find my patience unlimited, since continued exposure to this process has left me in awe that anyone has ever once learned to read at all.[ The reading wars: What is the best way to teach kids their ABCs?Opens in new window ]And yet they do. With a speed and delight that’s awe-inspiring, the self-same kids who couldn’t hold a book last September now skip through big words with abandon. They tremble with glee at complex phonemes and swap words and shift emphases and engage in rudimentary punning. They are achieving, they are creating, the miracle of language. I’m in awe of them, these conquerors of the word. Reading Champions, each and every one of them.